How Literature May Illustrate History

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Title:     How Literature May Illustrate History
Author: David Masson [More Titles by Masson]

HOW LITERATURE MAY ILLUSTRATE HISTORY.[1]

[1] Macmillan's Magazine, July 1871.

Some of the ways in which Literature may illustrate History are obvious enough. In the poems, the songs, the dramas, the novels, the satires, the speeches, even the speculative treatises, of any time or nation, there is imbedded a wealth of direct particulars respecting persons and events, additional to the information that has been transmitted in the formal records of that time or nation, or in its express histories of itself. "It has often come to my ears that it is a saying too frequently in your mouth that you have lived long enough for yourself:" so did Cicero, if the speech in which the passage occurs is really his, address Cæsar face to face, in the height of his power, and not long before his assassination, remonstrating with him on his melancholy, and his carelessness of a life so precious to Rome and to the world. If the words are any way authentic, what a flash they are into the mind of the great Roman in his last years, when, blasé with wars and victories, and all the sensations that the largest life on earth could afford, he walked about the streets of Rome, consenting to live on so long as there might be need, but, so far as he himself was concerned, heedless when the end might come, the conspirators in a ring round him, the short scuffle, the first sharp stab of the murderous knife!

Let this pass as one instance of a valuable illustration of Biography and History derived from casual reading. Literature teems with such: no one can tell what particles of direct historical and biographical information lie yet undiscovered and unappropriated in miscellaneous books. But there is an extension of the use for the historian of the general literature of the time with which he may be concerned. Not only does Literature teem with yet unappropriated anecdotes respecting the persons and events of most prominent interest in the consecutive history of the world; but quite apart from this, the books, and especially the popular books, of any time, are the richest possible storehouses of the kind of information the historian wants. Whatever may be the main thread of his narrative, he has to re-imagine more or less vividly what is called the general life of the time, its manners, customs, humours, ways of thinking, the working of its institutions, all the peculiarities of that patch of the never-ending, ever-changing rush and bustle of human affairs, to-day above the ground, and to-morrow under. Well, here in the books of the time he has his materials and aids. They were formed in the conditions of the time; the time played itself into them; they are saturated with its spirit; and costumes, customs, modes of eating and drinking, town-life, country life, the traveller on horseback to his inn, the shoutings of mobs in riot, what grieved them, what they hated, what they laughed at, all are there. No matter of what kind the book is, or what was its author's aim; it is, in spite of itself, a bequest out of the very body and being of that time, reminding us thereof by its structure through and through, and by a crust of innumerable allusions. It has been remarked by Hallam, and by others, how particularly useful in this way for the historian, as furnishing him with social details of past times, are popular books more especially of the humorous order--comic dramas and farces, poems of occasion, and novels and works of prose-fiction generally. How the plays of Aristophanes admit us to the public life of Athens! How, as we read the Satires and Epistles of Horace, we see old Rome, like another huge London, only with taller houses, and the masons mending the houses, and the poet himself, like a modern official in Somerset House, trudging along to his office, jostled by the crowds, and having to get out of the way of the ladders and the falling rubbish, thinking all the while of his appointment with Mæcenas! Or, if it is the reign of George II. in Britain that we are studying, where shall we find better illustration of much of the life, and especially the London life, of that coarse, wig-wearing age, than in the novels of Fielding and Smollett?

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These, and perhaps other ways in which Literature may illustrate History, are tolerably obvious, and need no farther exposition. There is, however, a higher and somewhat more subtle service which Literature may perform towards illustrating History and modifying our ideas of the Past.

What the historian chiefly and finally wants to get at, through all his researches, and by all his methods of research, is the mind of the time that interests him, its mode of thinking and feeling. Through all the trappings, all the colours, all the costumes, all those circumstances of the picturesque which delight us in our recollections of the past, this is what we seek, or ought to seek. The trappings and picturesque circumstances are but our optical helps in our quest of this; they are the thickets of metaphor through which we push the quest, interpreting as we go. The metaphors resolve themselves; and at last it is as if we had reached that vital and essential something--a clear transparency, we seem to fancy it, and yet a kind of throbbing transparency, a transparency with pulses and powers--which we call the mind or spirit of the time. As in the case of the individual, so in that of a time or a people, we seem to have got at the end of our language when we use this word, mind or spirit. We know what we mean, and it is the last thing that we can mean; but, just on that account, it eludes description or definition. At best we can go to and fro among a few convenient synonyms and images. Soul, mind, spirit, these old and simple words are the strongest, the profoundest, the surest; age cannot antiquate them, nor science undo them; they last with the rocks, and still go beyond. But, having in view rather the operation than the cause, we find a use also in such alternative phrases as "mode of thinking," "mode of feeling and thinking," "habit of thought," "moral and intellectual character or constitution," and the like. Or, again, if we will have an image of that which from its nature is unimaginable, then, in our efforts to be as pure and abstract as possible, we find ourselves driven, as I have said, into a fancy of mind as a kind of clear aërial transparency, unbounded or of indefinite bounds, and yet not a dead transparency, but a transparency full of pulses, powers, motions, and whirls, capable in a moment of clouding itself, ceasing to be a transparency, and becoming some strange solid phantasmagory, as of a landscape smiling in sunshine or a sky dark with a storm. Yet again there is another and more mechanical conception of mind which may be of occasional use. The thinking power, the thinking principle, the substance which feels and thinks, are phrases for mind from of old: what if we were to agree, for a momentary advantage, to call mind rudely the thinking apparatus? What the advantage may be will presently appear.

Mind, mode of thinking, mode of thinking and feeling, moral and intellectual constitution, that mystic transparency full of pulses and motions, this thinking apparatus,--whichever phrase or image we adopt, there are certain appertaining considerations which we have to take along with us.

(1.) There is the consideration of differences of degree, quality, and worth. Mind may be great or small, noble or mean, strong or weak; the mode of thinking of one person or one time may be higher, finer, grander than that of another; the moral and intellectual constitutions of diverse individuals or peoples may present all varieties of the admirable and lovely or the despicable and unlovely; the pulses and motions in that mystic transparency which we fancy as one man's mind may be more vehement, more awful, more rhythmical and musical, than are known in that which we fancy as the mind of some other; the thinking apparatus which A possesses, and by which he performs the business of his life, may be more massive, more complex, more exquisite, capable of longer reaches and more superb combinations, than that which has fallen to the lot of B. All this is taken for granted everywhere; all our speech and conduct proceed on the assumption.

(2.) Somewhat less familiar, but not unimportant, is a consideration which I may express by calling it the necessary instability of mind, its variability from moment to moment. Your mind, my mind, every mind, is continually sustaining modifications, disintegrations, reconstructions, by all that acts upon it, by all it comes to know. We are much in the habit, indeed, of speaking of experience, of different kinds of knowledge, as so much material for the mind--material delivered into it, outspread as it were on its floor, and which it, the lord and master, may survey, let lie there for occasion, and now and then select from and employ. True! but not the whole truth! The mind does not stand amid what it knows, as something distinct and untouched; the mind is actually composed at any one moment of all that it has learnt or felt up to that moment. Every new information received, every piece of knowledge gained, every joy enjoyed, every sorrow suffered, is then and there transmuted into mind, and becomes incorporate with the prior central substance. To resort now to that mechanical figure which I said might be found useful: every new piece of information, every fact that one comes to apprehend, every probability brought before one in the course of life, is not only so much new matter for the thinking apparatus to lay hold of and work into the warp and woof of thought; it is actually also a modification of the thinking apparatus itself. The mind thinks with what it knows; and, if you alter the knowledge in any one whit, you alter the thinking instrumentality in proportion. Our whole practice of education is based on this idea, and yet somehow the idea is allowed to lurk. It may be brought out best perhaps by thinking what may happen to a mind that has passed the period of education in the ordinary sense. A person of mature age, let us say, betakes himself, for the first time, to the study of geology. He gains thereby so much new and important knowledge of a particular kind. Yes! but he does more. He modifies his previous mind; he introduces a difference into his mode of thinking by a positive addition to that instrumentality of notions with which he thinks. The geological conceptions which he has acquired become an organic part of that reason, that intellect, which he applies to all things whatsoever; he will think and imagine thenceforward with the help of an added potency, and, consequently, never again precisely as he did before. Generalize this hint, and let it run through history. The mind of Man cannot remain the same through two consecutive generations, if only because the knowledge which feeds and makes mind, the notions that constitute the thinking power, are continually varying. In this age of a hundred sciences, all tramping on Nature's outside with their flags up, and marching her round and round, and searching her through and through for her secrets, and flinging into the public forum their heaps of results, how is it possible to call mind the same as it was a generation or two ago, when the sciences were fewer, their industry more leisurely, and their discoveries less frequent? Nay, but we may go back not a generation or two only, but to generation beyond generation through a long series, still, as we ascend, finding the sciences fewer, earth's load of knowledge lighter, and man's very imagination of the physical universe which he tenants cruder and more diminutive. Till two hundred years ago the Mundus, or physical system of things, to even the most learned of men, with scarcely an exception, was a finite spectacular sphere, or succession of spheres, that of the fixed stars nearly outermost, wheeling round the central earth for her pleasure; as we penetrate through still prior centuries, even this finite spherical Mundus is seen to shrink and shrink in men's fancies of it till a radius of some hundreds of miles would sweep from the earth to the starry roof; back beyond that again the very notion of sphericity disappears, and men were walking, as it seemed, on the upper side of a flat disc, close under a concave of blue, travelled by fiery caprices. How is it possible to regard man's mode of thinking and feeling, man's mind, as in any way constant through such vicissitude in man's notions respecting his very housing in space, and the whole encircling touch of his physical belongings?

(3.) A third consideration, however, administers a kind of corrective to the last. It is that, though the last consideration is not unimportant, its importance practically, and as far as the range of historic time is concerned, may be easily exaggerated. We have supposed a person betaking himself to the study of geology, and have truly said that his very mode of thinking would be thereby affected, that his geological knowledge would pass into his reason, and determine so far the very cast of his mind, the form of his ability. Well, but he might have betaken himself to something else; and who can tell, without definite investigation, but that out of that something else he might have derived as much increase of his mental power, or even greater? There are thousands of employments for all minds, and, though all may select, and select differently, there are thousands for all in common. Life itself, all the inevitable activity of life, is one vast and most complex schooling. Books or no books, sciences or no sciences, we live, we look, we love, we laugh, we fear, we hate, we wonder; we are sons, we are brothers, we have friends; the seasons return, the sun shines, the moon walks in beauty, the sea roars and beats the land, the winds blow, the leaves fall; we are young, we grow old; we commit others to their graves, we see somewhere the little grassy mound which shall conceal ourselves:--is not this a large enough primary school for all and sundry; are not these sufficient and everlasting rudiments? That so it is we all recognise. Given some original force or goodness of nature, and out of even this primary school, and from the teaching of these common rudiments, may there not come, do there not come, minds worthy of mark--the shrewd, keen wit, the upright and robust judgment, the disposition tender and true, the bold and honest man? And though, for perfection, the books and the sciences must be superadded, yet do not the rudiments persist in constant over-proportion and incessant compulsory repetition through all the process of culture, and is not the great result of culture itself a reaction on the rudiments? And so, without prejudice to our foregone conclusion that mind is variable with knowledge, that every new science or body of notions conquered for the world modifies the world's mode of thinking and feeling, alters the cast and the working trick of its reason and imagination, we can yet fall back, for historic time at least, on the notion of a human mind so essentially permanent and traditional that we cannot decide by mere chronology where we may justly be fondest of it, and certainly cannot assume that its latest individual specimens, with all their advantages, are necessarily the ablest, the noblest, or the cleverest. In fact, however we may reconcile it with our theories of vital evolution and progressive civilization, we all instinctively agree in this style of sentiment. Shakespeare lived and died, we may say, in the pre-scientific period; he lived and died in the belief of the fixedness of our earth in space and the diurnal wheeling round her of the ten spectacular spheres. Not the less was he Shakespeare; and none of us dares to say that there is now in the world, or has recently been, a more superb thinking apparatus of its order than his mind was, a spiritual transparency of larger diameter, or vivid with grander gleamings and pulses. Two hundred and fifty years, therefore, chock-full though they are of new knowledges and discoveries, have not been a single knife-edge of visible advance in the world's power of producing splendid individuals; and, if we add two hundred and fifty to that, and again two hundred and fifty, and four times two hundred and fifty more without stopping, still we cannot discern that there has been a knife-edge of advance in that particular. For at this last remove we are among the Romans, and beyond them there lie the Greeks; and side by side with both, and beyond both, are other Mediterranean Indo-Europeans, and, away in Asia, clumps and masses of various Orientals. For ease of reference, let us go no farther than the Greeks. Thinking apparatuses of first-rate grip! mental transparencies of large diameter and tremulous with great powers and pulses! What do we say to Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and the rest of the great Hellenic cluster which these represent! True, their cosmology was in a muddle (perhaps ours is in a muddle too, for as little as we think so); but somehow they contrived to be such that the world doubts to this day whether, on the whole, at any time since, it has exhibited, in such close grouping, such a constellation of spirits of the highest magnitude. And the lesson enforced by this Greek instance may be enforced, less blazingly perhaps, but still clearly, as by the light of scattered stars, by instances from the whole course of historic time. Within that range, despite the vicissitudes of the mode of human thought caused by continued inquisitiveness and its results in new knowledges, despite the change from age to age in mankind's very image of its own whereabouts in space, and the extent of that whereabouts, and the complexity of the entanglement in which it rolls, it is still true that you may probe at any point with the sure expectation of finding at least some minds as good intrinsically, as strong, as noble, as valiant, as inventive, as any in our own age of latest appearances and all the newest lights. I am aware, of course, where the compensation may be sought. The philosophical historian may contend that, though some minds of early ages have been as able intrinsically as any minds of later ages, these later minds being themselves the critics and judges, yet an enormous general progress may be made out in the increased number in the later ages of minds tolerably able, in the heightening of the general level, in the more equable diffusion of intelligence, in the gradual extension of freedom, and the humanizing of manners and institutions. On that question I am not called upon to enter now, nor is my opinion on it to be inferred from anything I am now saying. I limit myself to the assertion that within historic time we find what we are obliged to call an intrinsic co-equality of some minds at various successive points and at long-separated intervals, and that consequently, if the human race is gradually acquiring a power of producing individuals more able than their ablest predecessors, the rate of its law in this respect is so slow that 2,500 years have not made the advance appreciable. The assertion is limited; it is reconcilable, I believe, with the most absolute and extreme doctrine of evolution; but it seems to be both important and curious, inasmuch as it has not yet been sufficiently attended to in any of the phrasings of that doctrine that have been speculatively put forward. No doctrine is rightly phrased, I would submit, when, if it were true according to that phrasing, it would be man's highest duty to proceed as if it weren't.

History itself, the mere tradition and records of the human race, would have authorized our assertion. Pericles, Epaminondas, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Cæsar, Charlemagne: would not the authenticated tradition of the lives and actions of those men, and others of their order, or of other orders, prove that possible capacity of the individual mind has not, for the last 2,500 years of our earth's history, been a mere affair of chronological date? But it is Literature that reads us the lesson most fully and convincingly. Some of those great men of action have left little or no direct speech of themselves. They mingled their minds with the rage of things around them; they worked, and strove, and died. But the books we have from all periods, the poems, the songs, the treatises, the pleadings--some of them from men great also in the world of action, but most from men who only looked on, and thought, and tried to rule the spirit, or to find how it might be ruled--these remain with us and can be studied yet microscopically. If what the Historian wants to get at is the mind of the time that interests him, or of the past generally, here it is for him in no disguised form, but in actual specimens. Poems, treatises, and the like, are actual transmitted bits of the mind of the past; every fragment of verse or prose from a former period preserves something of the thought and sentiment of that period expressed by some one belonging to it; the masterpieces of the world's literature are the thought and feeling of successive generations expressed, in and for each generation, by those who could express them best. What a purblind perversity then it is for History, professing that its aim is to know the mind or real life of the past, to be fumbling for that mind or life amid old daggers, rusty iron caps and jingling jackets, and other such material relics as the past has transmitted, or even groping for it, as ought to be done most strictly, in statutes and charters and records, if all the while those literary remains of the past are neglected from which the very thing searched for stares us face to face!

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There is a small corollary to our main proposition. It is that ages which we are accustomed to regard as crude, barbarous, and uncivilized, may turn out perhaps, on due investigation and a better construction of the records, to have been not so crude and barbarous after all, but to have contained a great deal of intrinsic humanity, interesting to us yet, and capable, through all intervening time and difference, of folding itself round our hearts. And here I will quit those great, but perhaps too continually obtrusive, Greeks and Romans, and will take my examples, all the homelier though they must be, from our own land and kindred.

The Fourteenth Century in our island was not what we should now hold up as a model age, a soft age, an orderly age, an instructed age, a pleasant age for a lady or gentleman that has been accustomed to modern ideas and modern comforts to be transferred back into. It was the age of the three first Edwards, Richard II., and Henry IV. in England, and of the Wallace Interregnum, Bruce, David II., and the two first Stuarts in Scotland. Much was done in it, as these names will suggest, that has come down as picturesque story and stirring popular legend. It is an age, on that account, in which schoolboys and other plain uncritical readers of both nations revel with peculiar relish. Critical inquirers, too, and real students of history, especially of late, have found it an age worth their while, and have declared it full of important facts and powerful characters. Not the less the inveterate impression among a large number of persons of a rapid modern way of thinking is that all this interesting vision of the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century is mere poetical glamour or antiquarian make-believe, and that the real state of affairs was one of mud, mindlessness, fighting and scramble generally, no tea and no newspapers, but plenty of hanging, and murder almost ad libitum. Now these are most wrong-headed persons, and they might be beaten black and blue by sheer force of records. But out of kindliness one may take a gentler method with them, and try to bring them right by æsthetic suasion. It so chances, for example, that there are literary remains of the fourteenth century, both English and Scottish, and that the authors of the chief of these were Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature proper, and John Barbour, the father of the English literature of North Britain. Let us take a few bits from Chaucer and Barbour. Purposely, we shall take bits that may be already familiar.

Here is Chaucer's often-quoted description of the scholar, or typical student of Oxford University, from the Prologue to his Canterbury Tales:--

A Clerk there was of Oxenford also,
That unto logic haddè long ygo,
As leanè was his horse as is a rake,
And he was not right fat, I undertake;
But lookèd hollow, and thereto soberly.
Full threadbare was his overest courtepy;
For he had getten him yet no benefice,
Ne was so worldly for to have office;
For him was liefer have at his bed's head
A twenty books, clothèd in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie
Than robès rich, or fiddle, or sautrie.
But, albe that he was a philosópher,
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;
But all that he might of his friendès hent
On bookès and on learning he it spent,
And busily gan for the soulès pray
Of hem that gave him wherewith to scholay.
Of study took he most cure and most heed;
Not oe word spak he morè than was need;
And that was said in form and reverence,
And short and quick, and full of high sentence;
Souning in moral virtue was his speech,
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

Or take an out-of-doors' scene from one of Chaucer's reputed minor poems. It is a description of a grove or wood in spring, or early summer:--

In which were oakès great, straight as a line,
Under the which the grass, so fresh of hue,
Was newly sprung, and an eight foot or nine
Every tree well fro his fellow grew,
With branches broad, laden with leavès new,
That sprungen out agen the sunnè sheen,
Some very red, and some a glad light green.

Or, for a tidy scene indoors, take this from another poem:--

And, sooth to sayen, my chamber was
Full well depainted, and with glass
Were all the windows well yglazed
Full clear, and not an hole ycrased,
That to behold it was great joy;
For wholly all the story of Troy
Was in the glazing ywrought thus,
Of Hector and of King Priamus,
Of Achilles and of King Laomedon,
And eke of Medea and Jason,
Of Paris, Helen, and Lavine;
And all the walls with colours fine
Weren paint, both text and glose,
And all the Rómaunt of the Rose:
My windows weren shut each one,
And through the glass the sunnè shone
Upon my bed with brighte beams.

Or take these stanzas of weighty ethical sententiousness (usually printed as Chaucer's, but whether his or not does not matter):--

Fly from the press, and dwell with soothfastness;
Suffice unto thy good, though it be small;
For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness,
Press hath envy, and weal is blent in all;
Savour no more than thee behovè shall;
Rede well thyself that other folk canst rede;
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.

Painè thee not each crooked to redress
In trust of her that turneth as a ball.
Great rest standeth in little business;
Beware also to spurn against an awl;
Strive not as doth a crockè with a wall;
Deemè thyself that deemest others dead;
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.

That thee is sent receive in buxomness;
The wrestling of this world asketh a fall;
Here is no home, here is but wilderness:
Forth, pilgrim! forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Look up on high, and thankè God of all:
Waivè thy lusts, and let thy ghost thee lead;
And truth shall thee deliver, it is no drede.

Or, finally, take a little bit of Chaucer's deep, keen slyness, when he is speaking smilingly about himself and his own poetry. He has represented himself as standing in the House or Temple of Fame, observing company after company going up to the goddess, and petitioning for renown in the world for what they have done. Some she grants what they ask, others she dismisses crestfallen, and Chaucer thinks the levée over:--

With that I gan about to wend,
For one that stood right at my back
Methought full goodly to me spak,
And said, "Friend, what is thy name?
Art thou come hither to have fame?"
"Nay, forsoothè, friend," quoth I;
"I came not hither, grammercy,
For no such causè, by my head.
Sufficeth me, as I were dead,
That no wight have my name in hand:
I wot myself best how I stand;
For what I dree or what I think
I will myselfè all it drink,
Certain for the morè part,
As farforth as I ken mine art!"

Chaucer ranks to this day as one of the very greatest and finest minds in the entire literature of the English speech, and stands therefore on a level far higher than can be assumed for his contemporary Barbour. But Barbour was a most creditable old worthy too. Let us have a scrap or two from his Bruce. Who does not know the famous passage which is the very key-note of that poem? One is never tired of quoting it:--

Ah! freedom is a noble thing;
Freedom makes man to have liking:
Freedom all solace to man gives;
He lives at ease that freely lives.
A noble heart may have nane ease,
Ne ellys nought that may him please
Gif freedom faileth; for free liking
Is yearnit ower all other thing;
Nor he that aye has livit free
May not know weel the propertie,
The anger, ne the wretched doom,
That is couplit to foul thirldom;
But, gif he had essayit it,
Then all perquére he suld it wit,
And suld think freedom mair to prize
Than all the gold in the warld that is.

Or take the portrait of the good Sir James, called "The Black Douglas," the chief companion and adherent of Bruce, introduced near the beginning of the poem, where he is described as a young man living moodily at St. Andrews before the Bruce revolt:--

Ane weel great while there dwellit he:
All men loved him for his bountie;
For he was of full fair effere,
Wise, courteous, and debonair;
Large and lovand also was he,
And ower all thing loved loyauty.
Loyautie to love is gretumly;
Through loyautie men lives richtwisely;
With a virtue of loyautie
Ane man may yet sufficiand be;
And, but loyautie, may nane have prize,
Whether he be wicht or be he wise;
For, where it failis, nae virtue
May be of prize, ne of value
To mak ane man sae good that he
May simply callit good man be.
He was in all his deedès leal;
For him dedeignit not to deal
With treachery ne with falsét.
His heart on high honóur was set,
And him contened in sic manére
That all him loved that war him near.
But he was not sae fair that we
Suld speak greatly of his beautíe.
In visage was he somedeal grey,
And had black hair, as I heard say;
But of his limbs he was well made,
With banès great and shoulders braid;
His body was well made leanlie,
As they that saw him said to me.
When he was blythe, he was lovely
And meek and sweet in company;
But wha in battle micht him see
All other countenance had he.
And in speech lispit he somedeal;
But that set him richt wonder weel.
To Good Hector of Troy micht he
In mony thingès likenit be.
Hector had black hair as he had,
And stark limbès and richt weel made,
And lispit also as did he,
And was fulfillit of loyautie,
And was courteous, and wise, and wicht.

My purpose in quoting these passages from Chaucer and Barbour will have been anticipated. Let me, however, state it in brief. We hear sometimes in these days of a certain science, or rather portion of a more general science, which takes to itself the name of Social Statics, and professes, under that name, to have for its business--I give the very phrase of those who define it--the investigation of "possible social simultaneities." That is to say, there may be a science of what can possibly go along with what in any social state or stage; or, to put it otherwise, any one fact or condition of a state of society being given, there may be inferred from that fact or condition some of the other facts and conditions that must necessarily have co-existed with it. Thus at length perhaps, by continued inference, the whole state of an old society might be imaged out, just as Cuvier, from the sight of one bone, could infer with tolerable accuracy the general structure of the animal. Well, will Social Statics be so good as to take the foregoing passages, and whirr out of them their "possible social simultaneities"? Were this done, I should be surprised if the England and Scotland of the fourteenth century were to turn out so very unlovely, so atrociously barbarian, after all. These passages are actual transmitted bits of the English and Scottish mind of that age, and surely the substance from which they are extracts cannot have been so very coarse or bad. Where such sentiments existed and were expressed, where the men that could express them lived and were appreciated, the surrounding medium of thought, of institutions, and of customs, must have been to correspond. There must have been truth, and honour, and courtesy, and culture, round those men; there must have been high heart, shrewd sense, delicate art, gentle behaviour, and, in one part of the island at least, a luxuriant complexity of most subtle and exquisite circumstance.

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The conclusion which we have thus reached vindicates that mood of mind towards the whole historical past which we find to have been actually the mood of all the great masters of literature whenever they have ranged back in the past for their themes. When Shakespeare writes of Richard II., who lived two hundred years before his own time, does he not overleap those two hundred years as a mere nothing, plunge in among Richard's Englishmen as intrinsically not different from so many great Elizabethans, make them talk and act as co-equals in whom Elizabethans could take an interest, and even fill the mouth of the weak monarch himself with soliloquies of philosophic melancholy and the kingliest verbal splendours? And so when the same poet goes back into a still remoter antique, as in the council of the Greek chiefs in his Troilus and Cressida. We speak of Shakespeare's anachronisms in such cases. There they are certainly for the critic to note; but they only serve to bring out more clearly his main principle in his art--his sense or instinct, for all historic time, of a grand over-matching synchronism. And, indeed, without something of this instinct--this sense of an intrinsic traditional humanity persisting through particular progressive variations, this belief in a co-equality of at least some minds through all the succession of human ages in what we call the historic period--what were the past of mankind to us much more than a history of dogs or ruminants? Nay, and with that measure with which we mete out to others, with the same measure shall it not be meted out to ourselves? If to be dead is to be inferior, and if to be long dead is to be despicable, to the generation in possession, shall not we who are in possession now have passed into the state of inferiority to-morrow, with all the other defunct beyond us, and will not a time come when some far future generation will lord it on the earth, and we shall lie deep, deep down, among the strata of the despicable?

[The end]
David Masson's essay: How Literature May Illustrate History

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